A shy, solitary figure, George Walton Lucas Jr. never wanted to be famous.  At least, not by making movies.  Born in the small town of Modesto, California on May 14, 1944, the young Lucas desired nothing more than to be a great race car driver.  In danger of flunking out of high school because of poor grades, Lucas spent his adolescence listening to music, cruising in his souped up Fiat Bianchina, and generally heading nowhere.  Then, at the age of 18, a near-fatal car crash changed his life forever.  As he told his biographer Dale Pollock in 1983, “I realized that I’d been living my life so close to the edge for so long.  That’s when I decided to go straight, to be a better student, to try to do something with myself” (Pollock xvi).  After two years of studying sociology and English at the local junior college, Lucas decided at the age of twenty to act upon an early love of art and photography and applied to film school at USC.  It did not take long for him to discover his calling as a filmmaker and he was soon earning awards for his short, documentary-style movies and abstract visual art.  Where other students complained about restrictive rules, Lucas simply ignored them.  “Whenever I broke the rules,” he theorized, “I made a good film, so there wasn’t much the faculty could do about it” (Pollock 44).  Dedicated, determined, and a rebel from the start, Lucas set out with the self-stated philosophy “that nothing was going to stop me” (O’Quinn 14).

    In 1967, a scholarship to work with a contemporary director put Lucas in contact with Francis Ford Coppola, jump-starting both a life-long friendship and Lucas’ career.  As young filmmakers in an era when the word “auteur” was first being bandied about, the two desired to make their own movies rather than what the studios wanted.  To this effect they formed the American Zoetrope Society and convinced Warner Brothers to fund their first venture, a full-length version of Lucas’ award-winning student film, THX 1138.  The film starred Robert Duvall as a fugitive running from robot police in a futuristic, subterranean world where love has been outlawed and people live a sterile, mechanistic existence.  Described in a 1971 review by Variety as “Abstract, handsomely stylistic but sluggish” (Salewicz 120), THX was set apart by its sparse dialogue, the stark black and white settings, and Lucas’ unique brand of editing whereby scenes cut from one to the next without warning or segue.  “George makes his visuals come to life with montage,” said friend Steven Spielberg, “That makes him unique in our generation, since most of us do it instead with composition and camera placement” (Pollock 54).  Despite this artistic endorsement, THX made for a confusing and uncommercial movie, leading the studio to order numerous alterations that Lucas found both unnecessary and insulting.  “It was a very personal kind of film and I didn’t think they had the right to come in and just arbitrarily chop it up at their own whim,” he told Pollock (97).  Thus began Lucas’ fierce battle with the Hollywood system for control over his own movies.  Much like the protagonist of THX, Lucas was determined to break free from the confines of Hollywood, which he considered to be an immoral and failing system; a feat he eventually achieved in 1981 with the construction of his own studio, Skywalker Ranch.

    Though a flop at the theaters, THX proved prophetic of Lucas in more than his desire to escape from Hollywood.  Three themes originating in THX can be found in all of Lucas’ movies: escaping repression through accepting responsibility, the triumph of humanity over machines, and the “Horatio Alger concept - the fact that if you apply yourself and work real hard, you can get what you want accomplished” (O’Quinn 14).  This last coincides with Lucas’ own motto for living, that “Talent without hard work doesn’t get you very far” (Pollock 53).  The stark contrast of black and white in the costumes and setting is also illustrative of Lucas’ fascination with the battle between good and evil, an interest that finds its ultimate expression in the black-suited Darth Vader and white garbed Skywalker twins.  Finally, as stated by Charles Champlin in George Lucas: The Creative Impulse, “His precocious mastery of the medium [film] was evident, and so was the essential warmth of his prevailing view – innocent, imaginative, and, despite all that he found alarming in society, finally optimistic” (26).  In Lucas’ own words, the message of THX is that “If we’re not careful about the way we conduct our lives, we’re going to live in a society devoid of pain and risk, but insulated, emotionless, and much more unpleasant” (Champlin 41).  In spite of this dystopian prediction, however, the protagonist escapes in an exciting car chase and emerges from the sewers to a glorious sunset.  With this resolution, Lucas’ optimistic worldview shines through the nightmare, turning a downbeat film into one, ultimately, of hope.

    For his next film, the first to bear the now famous Lucasfilm Ltd. logo, Lucas turned for inspiration to his adolescence in small-town northern California.  Not so much a story as a day in the life of four teenage boys, American Graffiti used rock music from the fifties to evoke the innocence of the past and the fears of growing up.  Like THX, Graffiti is about breaking free, in this case from the confines of childhood rather than a machine-controlled world.  “I’ve always been interested in that theme of leaving an environment or facing change, and how kids do it,” admits Lucas (Salewicz 30).  These themes of growing up, dealing with change, and accepting adult responsibility are once again Lucas standards, and the feeling of nostalgia imbues the film with the hopeful optimism of youth.  As happened with THX, Universal Studios refused to show the movie unless Lucas made what he termed “unpardonable” cuts (Pollock 120).  However, in spite of this antagonism and the movie’s low budget, Graffiti became a tremendous hit.  While “critics loved its artfulness, audiences adored its simple sense of fun” (Jenkins 47), and many young viewers wrote to Lucas thanking him for the uplifting and inspiring experience.  Coming as it did after the cool reaction to THX, this response led Lucas to a self-realization, “that making positive films is exhilarating” (Jenkins 54).

    Actually, it is Universal Studios that should have been doing the thanking: their $775,000 investment sold $117 million in tickets, returning $50 for every dollar invested, a ratio even Star Wars could not equal (Pollock 123).  When acting against his father’s wishes in going to film school, Lucas had promised his father that he would be a millionaire before he turned thirty.  Thanks to Graffiti, hard work, and no small amount of luck, he beat his mark by almost two years.  Lucas did not let the money go to his head, however, and began a tradition of distributing percentage points of his movies’ revenue as gifts to members of the cast and crew (Salewicz 39).  The rest of the money was invested in Star Wars, which earned Lucas enough to finance The Empire Strikes Back on his own.  In turn, Empire brought in enough revenue for Lucas to build his own self-sustaining studio, Skywalker Ranch, and to finally achieve his long-desired separation from Hollywood.  Today when Lucas says, “Every movie I’ve made is the movie I wanted to make,” he means it (O’Quinn 7).